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Futurama Returns
GrumpySimon writes "Good news everyone!
Straight from a one-eyed alien's mouth - 13 new episodes of Futurama have been confirmed by Katey Sagal on Craig Ferguson's Late Late Show. All the original actors have signed up too."
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While I applaud it, I remember the resurrection of Ren & Stimpy and how it just wasn't quite the same anymore. The making of a popular series can often rest on the frenzy of creating the episodes and the chemistry of those at work on it. Add an interruption, time for other projects and influences, what will become of pulling the team back together? Will it be the same, or will it be like, "well, Bender saying, 'bite my shiny metal asee' doesn't totally suck, but it's just, you know, different now."
Other news in the It's About Time Department:
In other good news, finally on DVD, Yellowbeard! Arr! July 27 for USA & Canada or July 10 for UK No word yet on extras, like Group Madness, the documentary of making of the film.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
All thirteen episodes will come in a suppository!
Complete with New shinier, easily bitable metal ass.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Hip, hip, huzzah! Hip, hip, huzzah! Hip, ah screw it.
Sweet Zombie Jesus!!!!
Cuz the actors never get it wrong.
P.S. I feel like it's some futurama reference that my CAPTCHA was "breeder." Is Slashdot trying to say something about the human race?
I wonder if this will affect the 4 movies that are currently being planned. Ride the Walrus!
I disagree.
-Richard M. Nixon's head
The problem is that everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, even when they don't.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Dude - It's just a cartoon.
Noone's really saying that Futurama is better than Dr Who, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable. Plot? No way. Funny? Absolutely! More importantly, it's just entertaining.
That's something I love about these kind of shows. You don't need to make the investment to watch them. I hate it that I can't watch a lot of "running plot" shows because I know I'm going to miss a bunch of them. With Futurama/Simpsons, I can just watch them if I'm free.
It's funny simply becuase it is. I enjoy the more scientific humour of the show. Things like winning by a quantum difference (I know I'm misquoting this) being responded with things like: "No fair! You changed the result by measuring it" It adds a humour for the physicist in me. Regards, Alunduil
We'll I'm sure they'll post a dupe to make up for it.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Considering that the recent thread on global warming is about to reach 600 posts, I think I should remind everyone that there is hope:
Fry: This snow is beautiful. I'm glad global warming never happened.
Leela: Actually it did. But thank God nuclear winter cancelled it out.
First Family Guy, then Futurama. Where's Firefly?
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
Okay, so all of the original actors have signed up. But what I'd like to know is if all of the original writers have signed up.
Professor: Good news everyone. While Fox's quality programming is out of our reach, Comedy Control has decided to take us for some new episodes.
Fry: Don't you mean Comedy Central?
Leela: No, Comedy Control. Comedy was outlawed in the year 2045, during the Great War with the Neptutians. Comedy Control comes around and kills everyone involved with animated shows.
Except Jurassic Bark. You can only watch that once unless you have no heart.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Futurama does indeed have long-term plot elements, more so than most live action television shows (and at least comparable with Doctor Who and its Daleks and Cybermen). Generally the plot centers around Fry.
- Fry and the Brains (and the Nibblonians)
During the series it transpires that Fry is the only human being capable of resisting the psionic attacks of the Brains, a group of free-flying brain beings that want to take over/destroy the universe. Fry's brain waves are different from other peoples because Fry, as a result of events in the episode "Roswell that Ends Well", is his own grandfather.
In the first encounter with the Brains Fry is abducted by Nibbler, who is not only Leela's pet, but also an agent of the ancient and stupendously powerful Nibblonians (which explains why he was the only one of his kind on the planet where he was found). Nibbler explains Fry's abnormality and assists him in fending off the Brains' attack on earth. After Fry succeeds Nibbler wipes Fry's memory (everyone else was too stupefied by the Brains to remember what happened) and resumes his life as Leela's pet.
Later, in The Why of Fry, we learn that Fry was not frozen by accident. In fact Fry was brought into the future by Nibbler, whose much younger self was present on New Years' Eve '99, and who gave Fry the nudge that tipped him backwards into the cryogenic chamber. In this episode Fry is press ganged into service to destroy the Brains' ultimate project, a device that will acquire all knowledge in the universe and then destroy the universe to prevent its knowledge from becoming outdated.
Once Fry is inside the Mega-Brain and has activated the bomb with which he is to destroy it, the Brains reveal what Nibbler did to Fry and offer Fry a choice - he can stay there, blow up the Mega Brain and vanish along with it due to the failure of his escape scooter, or he can let the Mega Brain catapult him back in time to the space-time nexus centred on his own fall into the cryochamber.
Fry elects to travel back, and in fact initially prevents Nibbler from knocking him into the tube, until Nibbler persuades him that he should sacrifice himself and fulfill his predestined mission, because...
- Fry Loves Leela
Fry has an unrequited passion for Leela throughout most of the series. In a sense there is a lack of follow through here, because they do pull kind of a "will they/won't they?" thing, but Fry does succeed in communicating the depth of his feelings at times, and when he wins the devil's hands and uses them to make a holophoner opera in Leela's honour Leela realises that Fry has a depth of character and feeling that is concealed by his physical and social clumsiness.
- Leela and Her Parents
As someone else mentioned here, Leela's parent enter the series late in the piece and stick around. In fact I was surprised that nobody responded to the "straight from the alien's mouth" in the article by pointing out that Leela, as we discover when her parents emerge, is not an alien but a mutant, whose xenolinguist parents left her at an orphanage with a note in an invented alien script, so that she would be taken for an alien and avoid the apartheid-style restrictions places on mutants. This is a major shift for Leela both in the sense that earlier episodes made much of her search for her species and homeworld, and in that at least two episodes towards the end of the series are heavily concerned with her relationship with her newfound parents.
- Amy and Kif
Amy, the engineering student from Mars, and Kif, Zapp Brannigan's XO, fall in love early in the series and their developing romance is the subject of multiple episodes throughout subsequent seasons.
i'm sure there are other examples of long-term continuity that have slipped my mind, but really nobody could accuse Futurama of forgeting its past.
Dude, why would you want to stick a pin in a kid?
Holy crap! I can't believe it-- someone was actually watching Craig Ferguson!
I never said otherwise - I was just hassling my PP for overanalysing. What next? "Oh, but at the end of The Simpson's 3D, homer ends up in the real world, but then in the next episode he's back in the Simpson's universe!". Or "Buffy is just so fake: There's no such thing as vampires!"
No. Like many people here (yourself included), I prefer Futurama to Dr Who. Anyone who tries to argue that one successful show is better than another successful show is an idiot, and you might as well be trying to prove the existence or non-existence of god, or the general superiority of one OS over another. It's a personal thing. One is better than the other for you.
I have - many times. The first time I watched it, I watched it out of order. Yes, I didn't pick up on the exact history behind each character, but I didn't miss out on any important story-line elements. (Ok - so the same is probably actually true for Dr Who, but there are many other shows where missing a couple of episodes makes the later ones not worth watching).
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Idealy this would happen: There is an official Futurama web-site, they say they want a new season, they need US $ X to produce it. They sell shares on their website or through ebay using a dutch auction in order to finance the project. Geeks buy them. They make the episodes. They realase them on the internet in a non DRM format and using bittorrent so they don't have to pay for bandwith. People pay a small amount of money to download the .torrent file. If they want to pirate it anyway nothing will stop them so why bother with protection. Many people download that great show, the benefits are given to the shareholders. Everyone is happy.
You bitch needlessly. All the tools you need are but a few hundred dollars away!
1) Registering a domain name and getting cheap-ass hosting costs less than a few hundred dollars per year.
2) You can put a link to your project on your slashdot sig and get surprising amounts of attention that way.
3) You only need to come up with an idea for a show, and recruit some star talent. Really, you're on your way already, since you have a business plan that's pretty detailed!
Unless you aren't serious about your business plan. Maybe you wouldn't know a real business plan if it kicked you in the nards. Maybe the idea of actually doing anything outside your mother's basement scares you. In which case, your post is just so much whining and incoherent noise on a populate public blog. There's lots of that already.
The proof of whether or not you have a good idea is in your ability to make it reality. Otherwise, it's just so much hot air, and thanks to global warming, we have more than enough of that.
But, I suggest you give it a try. You'll either succeed, or learn lots about how the world around you works - either way, you win, and win BIG.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.